I’ve never been rich. Ever since I was small I remember feeling very envious of all my friends in primary school who had televisions and telephones in their bedrooms and thinking I was the poorest kid in the whole school. We lived in a council house, had a black and white television in the lounge and didn’t have a telephone.
My mother sewed all my clothes and I envied the other children their Disney merchandise and the latest Barbie dolls, Cabbage Patch Kids and Care Bears. I coveted all these things wantonly and I was never grateful to my parents for the two times a year I would get a present – Christmas and my birthday.
Not that my brother and I didn’t have toys, but they were generally hand-me-downs. I used to look forward to seeing my grandparents or godparents because they would squeeze a couple of pounds into the palm of my little hand as they were saying goodbye. It was the best feeling in the world.
I’d never spend the money, unlike my brother, who would blow it all on sweets within a week. I would always carefully salt my gift money away together with my princely pocket money of 50p a week (which was payment for a list of household chores I did for my mother). When my money tin was full I would go down to the bank with mother and deposit it in my savings account. When I left England with my parents at the age of ten I had managed to amass a fortune of a thousand pounds.
Then my father used my savings in Seychelles because we were in a financial mess. Well, my parents did put me through school, feed me and clothe me throughout my childhood so I guess I am the one that still owes them.
I thought we were poor in England but Seychelles introduced me to a new world of poverty. We lived in a house (for want of a better word) in the middle of a rainforest. The “house” was made of tin, or corrugated iron, the walls and the roof. The floor was cold concrete. We had no furniture and my parents slept on the floor for a year and a half. My brother and I slept on deck chairs, the long type that can be set out straight. They often collapsed or snapped shut in the middle of the night, leaving crooked limbs sticking out unnaturally, bruises to be counted the next morning.
Our stove was paraffin and we had no fridge. We also had no hot water, so my mother would fill a large kettle and boil it, then put it in a large plastic bucket and we would wash ourselves like that.
When you live in a rainforest one thing you will get tired of very quickly is, er, rain. And humidity. If you wash your clothes and put them out to dry on the line little black spots of mould will form on them before you have a chance to take them down.
Even though I am still not well-off enough to stop having panic attacks about the end of the month, I now live in South Africa, and although it’s not first-world, we have all the amenities here (unless you are unfortunate enough to be one of the millions of people in this country who live in an informal settlement). But in urban areas, we do enjoy the trappings of modern life. We have televisions, fancy cars, brick and mortar houses, high-speed internet access, geysers, electricity (most days - ha!), refuse removal and all the rest of it. However, if you asked me which kind of life I preferred, I would take the rainforest in Seychelles any day over this over-sexed, over-stressed rat race.
The Seychelles is not a utopia. It has many problems associated with your typical third-world country. Corruption, nepotism, inflation, socialism with all its pitfalls and an unstable food supply are just some of those things. It’s tough to make inroads in a country where the entire population is about 75 000, everyone knows one another and they are distrustful of outsiders. It’s a bit like being a mouse living in a cattery.
However, it may just be one of the best places in the world for your kid to grow up. Mahe, the main island, boasts pristine white beaches around the coast and lush, diverse rainforests inland. The islands abound with unique flora and fauna which cannot be found anywhere else in the world.
Three languages are spoken in Seychelles – the native Creole, French and English. A working knowledge of French is recommended, but the Creole language is one of the easiest in the whole world. Imagine, no masculine or feminine! No “le” or “la”! What joy abounds in my heart! Everyone and everything is an “it”…
Every weekend, my brother and I used to explore the stream running past our house. We would take large sticks to break down the cobwebs (in Seychelles you get orange-and-black spiders as big as dinner-plates) that would stretch from one side to the other. We hopped from one rock to another while our dog Churchill would forge ahead in the icy water ahead of us, urging us on with incessant yaps of joy.
The rainforest was full of cinnamon trees, and the smell of the bark was indescribably delicious. I would often pick the hard, bright green leaves and break them in half just to drink in the smell of cinnamon. If I close my eyes I can still get the outline of the smell in my memory.
My mother’s parents had an estate near Anse Boileau, and everything you could possibly imagine was grown in that place. Jack fruit, oranges that looked like lemons, bread fruit, zamalak fruit (my personal favourite and unique to Seychelles), coffee, tea, coconuts, bananas, pamplemousse (a sort of sweet grapefruit) and so much more. The smell I associate with the estate is coffee beans, being roasted slowly in a large Marmite pot on an open fire by my grandmother.
Just a short walk and you were at the beach, where my uncle would go out in his boat, wearing only his underpants (cringe). Every evening he would return with the most beautiful fish you have ever seen or tasted in your life, lobsters, crayfish, crabs, octopus and small sharks. The fish would be grilled and served with plain rice and sometimes vegetables. My mother’s family’s estate was one of the few truly self-sufficient farms I have ever seen. The only foodstuffs they ever needed to buy were things like rice and perhaps oil and flour.
There are two things which were quite difficult to obtain in Seychelles – milk and potatoes. I hated milk powder with such a passion that I still can’t drink it today. I’m sure that these days the Seychelles Marketing Board imports long-life milk from South Africa or India, so I could probably live with that. And potatoes… how this little English child longed for fried chips! They tried to make chips from bread fruit, which was deliciously sweet, to satisfy my craving but to my mind it was, well, close but no cigar.
The schools in Seychelles are big on corporal punishment. My headmistress, Miss Lize, was a lady who, if you had met her socially, would never seem the type of person who would stalk the corridors with a large cane gripped in her dainty fingers, searching for a suitable child to beat the living crap out of, but there you go.
This is actually a huge improvement on my mother’s time at the same school I attended, Baie Lazare School, which was back in those days run by nuns. When you think of nuns, you invariably conjure up a picture in your head of humble, wrinkled, smiling old ladies doing the Lord’s work. But if you were to believe my mother, they were sado-masochistic agents of the devil, continually devising new methods of torture upon any children unfortunate enough to draw attention to themselves.
If a child was caught doing anything funny in class, his or her offending head would be cracked against the blackboard. If two of them were caught talking in class, two unfortunate skulls would be cracked together. Anyone caught speaking Creole instead of the more “civilised” French would be made to stand outside all day on one leg holding two large bricks up in their outstretched hands while the tropical sun beat down on them. Cries begging for mercy or water went unheeded and if the child lost his balance or dropped the bricks a public caning was in store.
Every day beatings were handed out left, right and centre, rained down upon hands, heads, buttocks and any other area of flesh available. This is probably why my mother was never very interested in pursuing an education.
It continually amazes me that my mother still thinks of herself as a devout Catholic. My experiences with the Church were enough to put me off for life, but she is a real keeper, for better or worse.
All in all, I am proud of my Seychellois heritage. I am proud to be a Seychelloise citizen. Not many people can say their country’s president visited them at their house. Hardly anyone can say they grew up in an island paradise. And very few people even know where the Seychelles is. They don’t know about our traditional Sega music and dance. They don’t know what it’s like to live off the land and make soup from clams dug from your very own beach. So perhaps I was not really poor, perhaps I was rich and just didn’t know it at the time.
©Hajira Amla 2009 – all rights reserved.
